Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, Nintendo’s wacky new life sim, has been out in the world for two weeks now. Typically, that isn’t much time in video game terms; it can take months, even years, for players to push a game’s creative tools as far as they can go. But most game series don’t have a community as dedicated as the one Tomodachi Life has. Players got off to the races on day one, creating the kind of masterpieces that you’d expect to see deep in a game’s lifespan. (Some players even went as far as to make external tools to help make drawing easier.)
We’ve been cataloging the best creations we’ve seen in Living the Dream since day one. It’s an enormous list full of perfect Mii caricatures, photorealistic recreations of real objects, and galaxy-brained memes. Here are just a handful of the best creations we’ve seen, which showcase just how boundless creative (and hilarious) the Tomodachi Life community is.
1
Breaking Bad
Despite being based on a 20-year-old Wii tool, Living the Dream’s Mii creator is surprisingly powerful. You can turn just about any person into a cartoon avatar with some creative thinking. You can see that on display here, as Reddit user randomg0ds nailed the entire cast of Breaking Bad down without relying on the life sim’s face paint tool. Just look at that Walter Jr.!
2
Avatar the Last Airbender
You can see the Mii creator taken in a very different, but equally impressive direction thanks to AdEquivalent9103’s recreation of Avatar the Last Airbender’s cast. It doesn’t just highlight how you can use face paint to bring cartoons to life; it’s also a great use of the Living the Dream’s outfit customization tools. It’s the colorful robes that really bring Aang and the gang to life here.
3
Randy Marsh as Lorde
There are plenty more incredible Miis to find out there, but I have to shout out TikTok user xok1ara’s take on South Park’s Randy Marsh as Lorde. It’s such a perfect recreation that it doesn’t even look like a Mii. It just looks like a full 3D scan of a South Park character dropped into another video game entirely. Setting Randy’s catchphrase as “yayaya” really sells the whole gag.
4
Bikini Bottom
You have a lot of control over your Miis’ houses, even if you can’t add furniture to them. The customization suite allows you to create your own wallpapers and floors, but real sickos can redesign the exteriors entirely. It’s a high-level tool to learn, but Reddit user lexyinorbit models how powerful it can be. Take a look at this ode to SpongeBob SquarePants, with perfect replicas of Squidward, Patrick, and SpongeBob’s houses. (And for an even more impressive feat, check out this unbelievable Nasty Patty.)
5
The Mushroom Kingdom
You can really start to get creative with your island when you start mixing custom exteriors with outdoor decorations. Living the Dream doesn’t give you a ton to work with when it comes to the latter, but it’s not stopping players from getting experimental. I love Happycrige’s work-in-progress Mushroom Kingdom here, which cleverly surrounds Princess Peach’s castles with colorful hills. It’s simple, but effective, completely changing Living the Dream’s island aesthetic.
6
Costco
When I made my island, one of the first people I added to it was The Rizzler. I was so proud of my work and started training him to talk about Costco all the time. Then I remembered that The Rizzler is not in fact one of the Costco Guys. Anyway, I hope that Peoplez101 did not make the same mistake when putting a full Costco on their island.
7
500 cigarettes
If there’s a meme out there, there’s a good chance it already exists in Living the Dream — no matter how esoteric it is. Case in point: 500 cigarettes. Escalating a running gag in the community where players kept adding Marlboro Reds to their islands, cc_slider upped the ante by turning a gag from The Orville into a digestible item. My favorite detail here, though, was how it was made. The creator said that they didn’t make this by making a row of cigarettes and then cloning them. “I rawdogged placing all 500 cigarettes,” cc_slider posted.
8
AO3
If you read fan fiction, then you’re familiar with Archive of Our Own and its reputation in online spaces. So it probably comes as no surprise that the website got turned into a Mii, because why not? More specifically, Reddit user juicy_helicopter recreated the page containing “Goku dies,” a fan fic in which “Goku gets shot and dies.” If you go even deeper down that rabbit hole, you can find a very infamous Zootopia comic on some players’ islands.
9
2002 Ford Taurus
I don’t have anything clever or revelatory to say about this one. Good car.
10
Pokémon Pokopia
Egg-hime’s incredible recreation of Pokémon Pokopia might be my favorite thing I’ve come across so far. That’s not just because it’s pretty funny to see a player put Nintendo’s previous life sim inside its new one. It’s not even that it’s an incredibly detailed pixel art recreation of a video game screenshot. It’s the backstory: Egg-hime created this by adapting a cross-stitch pattern to Living the Dream’s pixel grid. That gives the handmade screenshot a tangible aesthetic; it really looks like an embroidered image! Creations like this have me convinced that we’ve only seen the surface of what players will be able to create in Living the Dream. I’m both excited and terrified to find out what’s next.
